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AMD HD 7xxx support plan?

I am also warming up to upgrading my system and the HD 7750/7770 look very interesting from a performance/power/price perspective. From the Phoronix tests it seems the cards are reasonably well supported in the binary Catalyst driver. However for me to choose the AMD card I would really like some more solid indication from AMD for when video playback is properly supported and when/if Open Source support becomes available?

Otherwise I might as well choose a NVidia card - 550 or 640 with GDDR5 (when that becomes available). Even though NVidia do not support Open Source, they at least provides solid video support.

Help me help you

Originally Posted by Veto

Please AMD - help us to want to buy your products!

I think first someone needs to help AMD. It must be tough for them swimming against the tide while they're circling the drain! AMD seems to have changed their policy several times with Linux over the years. Say what you will about Nvidia at least they're consistent.

If AMD went belly up tomorrow I wouldn't shed any tears. ATI sucked too.

I am also warming up to upgrading my system and the HD 7750/7770 look very interesting from a performance/power/price perspective. From the Phoronix tests it seems the cards are reasonably well supported in the binary Catalyst driver. However for me to choose the AMD card I would really like some more solid indication from AMD for when video playback is properly supported and when/if Open Source support becomes available?

Otherwise I might as well choose a NVidia card - 550 or 640 with GDDR5 (when that becomes available). Even though NVidia do not support Open Source, they at least provides solid video support.

Please AMD - help us to want to buy your products!

I think lots of people would switch to ATI/AMD from Nvidia if they had improvements with their catalyst (binary) driver and actually supported video playback (hardware acceleration). They're restricted regarding open source. Alas, they are yet another Mikeysoft-friendly company and even though Nvidia has no open source support, ATI (AMD) refuses to break from their MS-centric policies. They have virtually no hardware acceleration with their graphics cards to speak of. You can read the latest here and it just shows that they will support Windows but not Linux.

AMD ... have virtually no hardware acceleration with their graphics cards to speak of.

Whilst it's fair to say that r600g is no match for fglrx, saying that AMD have virtually no h/w acceleration is, I think, a step too far. Try running benchmarks with the vesa driver if you want to see no h/w acceleration :-)

Due to the commitment to the open source driver development I want to stick with AMD graphics. However, I do need to use the proprietary driver for the time being. I do some gaming, and the open source driver isn't quite good enough for me there yet. My experience with Catalyst on my 6450 hasn't been as good as it is on Windows (graphical issues sometimes, tearing, crappier performance compared to Windows, etc), but I'm still willing to give AMD another chance.

I'm looking at the new 7750 because of its low power requirements + decent performance. I'm not a heavy gamer, but I'd like to be able to play some recent games (Rage if it comes to Linux, for example) without lag. Graphics quality isn't a huge issue since I usually turn down the eye-candy in games anyway. It seems like the 7750 might be a good option for this. As a reference, if it can smoothly play Quake 4 at Ultra (or high) on 1920x1080 I will be happy. I can run Quake 4 on my 6450, but there's a noticeable amount of jitter and lag. Unsure if this is related to Fglrx or the low-end 6450.

So in a nutshell:

- Under $120 (USD)
- Low power requirements (under 500w)
- Runs Quake 4 without any lag at 1920x1080
- Reliable fglrx driver until I can use the open source driver.
- Small in size (I'm thinking the 6770 or 7770 may be a bit large)

Any insight is appreciated. I'm a bit curious about the new architecture, hence why I'm considering a Southern Islands GPU.

I noticed that everyone keeps suggesting fixes, and completely forgets to ask some about the basic computer specifications.

Which distribution are you using?

How much memory is installed?

did you Build the Computer Yourself, or do a full system upgrade? ( Yes or No)
If the answer is yes, answer the Following:

What is the Processor?

What is the Motherboard?

What type of Memory is in the pc? (DDR3, DDR2, ETC )

If the answer is No, answer the Following:

What is the Vendor? ( Toshiba, Dell, HP, ETC )

What is the Model?

What is the Model Number?

All of these questions will provide a much better overall suggestion than a blind suggestion.

Anyways, I am certain that most of the performance problems is the graphics card, and an easy solution is to try the Radeon HD6670. I know of several gamers who have had excellent experiences on this card where they can play almost all games at maximum settings. I normally suggest video cards that are full size pci cards, however, I do know that there is some low profile cards available, and either of the following cards should handle the job well:

OP, I'm in the same boat as you. I have a GT430 in my HTPC at the moment and it works perfectly, but I need a little more power.

Around the £80 price range ($90 I guess) you have the GeForce GT640 2GB DDR3 and the RadeonHD 7750 1GB GDDR5. Now what sucks here is that the ATi card (using Windows benchmarks as an reference) performs better than the GT640 normally, has a lower TDP (important for quiet / HTPCs) and costs less!

But then the problem becomes that ATi card support under Linux isn't always great. For example native apps are generally ok, but quite a few games under Wine will simply not work (apparently this is due to the drivers still missing a lot of features that Wine needs to work properly). Also I'm not sure how under-par the raw performance of the Catalyst drivers is, compared to Windows giving their previous track record (where as nVidia's is generally fine).

So in summary: the 7750 is an all-round better card than the GT640, but may end up being worse / useless due to the drivers (depending on the usage). Pretty rubbish situation really.

EDIT: To add to this, which I forgot earlier, is that the Catalyst drivers are also normally lagging behind XOrg and Kernel updates, sometimes by several months, so if you're running an up-to-date distro, you may find that either you can't update your Kernel or XOrg for some time due a Catalyst incompatibility, or that you'll update them and suddenly find the driver doesn't work anymore. This has been my biggest annoyance on my ATi/AMD graphics hardware.

Last edited by Enverex; 06-25-2012 at 06:48 AM.
Reason: Added more info